Dragging and Dropping Files

One of the biggest complaints that new users have with Windows is that although it's fun (relatively speaking) to click-and-drag files and folders and drop them on new locations, they can never figure out whether the items are going to be copied or moved. There are, of course, rules for this kind of things:

• If you drop the item on a folder in the same disk or partition, Windows moves the item.

• If you drop the item on a folder in a different disk or partition, Windows copies the item.

The only bit of help Windows offered novices was to make a slight change to the mouse pointer (the addition of a tiny plus sign) when dropping the file or folder would result in copying the item.

Windows Vista improves on this by making the result of a drag-and-drop operation explicit when you're in mid-drag. As you can see in Figure 4.15, when you're dragging an item, the mouse pointer changes to display text that tells you exactly what will happen when you drop the item ("Move to Desktop" in this case).

Figure 4.15. Windows Vista provides more explicit clues about the result of a file drag-and-drop.